Today is my first official day with Kickfire. I've spent
most of the day reading up about how the appliance works and
trying to wrap my head around some of the finer details.

My starting role here is essentially as an internal consultant,
which means that I'll be the one that gets the MySQL server
related questions from the development team. This is going to
allow me a chance to really sink my teeth further into the source
code and help implement some really cool tech, which has me quite
excited.

Later I will be doing some external consulting (sales,
implementation, etc) that will allow me to travel a …

My name is Karl Van den Bergh — I do Business Development here at
Kickfire. I’ll be joining Raj on our corporate blog adding my
comments to what is happening at our company and in our
marketplace.

What a great conference (my first) and what a great venue it was
to have launched our company and beta product.

Now that I have switched from the dark side of commercial
software to the open source world, my eyes have been opened to
the power of the community. Specifically, the success of our
launch can, to a large degree, be attributed to the community.

Over the last couple of weeks I have heard comments in the
blogosphere to the effect that Kickfire has a great …

I had a chance to visit the Kickfire booth after the keynotes and
before the first presentation. They gave me a kicking t-shirt,
followed by a presentation on the newly announced Kickfire
appliance (now in beta, shipping in Fall 2008). Here are some
notes I jotted down:

von Neumann bottleneck

SQL chip (SQC), packs the power of 10s of conventional CPUs

Query parallelization on the chip

On-chip memory - 64GB. No registers - no von Neumann
bottleneck

Beats the performance of a given 3 server, 32 CPU, 130TB box
(1TB of actual data - space is used for distributing IO)

There are quite a few business angles you might see only if
you’re here at the conference, and you won’t get from blogs. For
example, let’s take a look at the contents of the shoulder bags
they hand out with your registration. (This is only a partial
list.)

SnapLogic’s flyer gets it right: their system is compatible
with “GNU Linux.” Hooray, a commercial company acknowledging the
GNU operating system for what it is!

MySQL Enterprise’s flyer has three big bullet points: MySQL
Load Balancer, MySQL Connection Manager, and MySQL Enterprise
Monitor Query Analyzer. The first two look like they’re probably
built on …

The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition
of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified
engines program is alive and well.

I spent the day Thursday with some of Kickfire’s engineers at
their headquarters. In this article, I’d like to go over a little
of the system’s architecture and some other details.

Everything in quotation marks in this article is a quote. (I
don’t use quotes when I’m glossing over a technical point — at
least, not in this article.)

Even though I saw one of Kickfire’s engineers running queries on
the system, they didn’t let me actually take the keyboard and
type into it myself. So everything I’m writing here is
still second-hand knowledge. It’s an unreleased
product that’s in very rapid development, …

Just a quick note: Kickfire is not based on SSD (solid-state device)
hard drives. Their old website says “SQL goes solid state” but
that just means SQL in hardware, not SSD.

When I was a child, we had a Sears Lady Kenmore clothes washing
machine that boasted “solid-state circuits” on the panel, in
flowery script writing. It was not based on SSD, either.

Finally, I am not on the Kickfire payroll. I’m not getting
anything from working with them, except perhaps the fun of being
in their labs while they’re still in stealth mode. It’s a harder
balance than you might think, writing about …

I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines
available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available
when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have
been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT
(PBXT) and Blob Streaming is obviously my clear focus,
actually now working for PrimeBase Technologies, the company
which I want to note for people is an Open Source company,
committed at providing an open source alternative to the other
commercial players. You also have at the …

Some of you have noticed Kickfire, a new sponsor at this year’s MySQL Conference and
Expo. Like Keith
Murphy, I have been involved with them for a while now. This
article explains the basics of how their technology is different
from the current state of the art in complex queries on large
amounts of data.

Kickfire is developing a MySQL appliance that combines a
pluggable storage engine (for MySQL 5.1) with a new kind of chip.
On the surface, the storage engine …

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